Devtome: Get Hundreds of Thousands of free Devcoins for writing

[FinShaggy]

We can't, because the largest bounty given to the most massive and essential infrastructure projects is twelve shares. Once. Not twelve shares per round.

Yet authors can get more than that, every round, just by doling out 13k or more words per round.

We aren't likely to get any infrastructure built when it is 80/12 as lucrative to dump old crap you wrote in high school than it is to work on mission-critical infrastructure projects.

Maybe the solution is to claim that devtome IS a mission-critical infrastructure project, and be extra super insanely generous to that project by awarding it - the entire devtome project - a max-sized bounty every single round, that is, twelve shares a round to devtome for devtome to share out as it pleases to its authors.

Then we can get on with finding other critical projects to promote, though so far those usually only seem to get 12 shares once, not twelve every damn round...

-MarkM-

I am not suggesting that the coin pay for these things, I am suggesting that we come together as a community to do these things ourselves.

I don't know who is dumping things from Highschool, but I also don't know what a "Mission Critical Infrastructure Project" is. And I don't see how Devtome could be used as a center of focus for the posting of such a thing, as there is VERY little traffic at this time. So I feel something like that would fit better in a thread here somewhere.

Or maybe just 12 shares that go to Devtome to use to grow. "Non-Profit" style (It's the "companies" money, not the people involved's)

Agreed, that would make other projects easier to start.

[MAbtc]

Well the 80 shares was probably a massive mistake, letting someone get that many shares, especially in one round, totally devalues everyone else's shares like crazy.

The incentive to write at all simply evaporated, heck it nearly wiped out admins and programmers and so on too from devtome authors suddenly getting 90+% or some such of all the shares, Unthinkingbit had to put in minimum percentage quotas for the admin category just to try to ensure people admin-ing websites for the project could maybe cover their hosting and bandwidth bills, maybe they still don't actually make anything once those bills are paid I am not sure.

I basically gave up writing, figuring if a whole bunch of people are going to dump 80k words on the devtome each round there really isn't much point bothering to write less words than that and since I don't figure I am likely to be able to write that many words I don't bother.

It would have made more sense probably to limit it like bounties, the biggest bounties usually seem to have been twelve shares, that is for entire programming projects specifically commissioned by the project. No author of random stuff should be able to make more than one massive bounty per round, surely? So 12 shares seems like a reasonable limit, some might say unreasonable since even that amounts to getting the largest bounty the project gives to the most-essential pieces of infrastructure yet authors get it for just having dumped 12k of some old story they wrote in high school?

The twelve shares for a bounty also tended to assume you might have a team doing the work, the team leader then shares it among the workers.

Heck entire software projects were only getting one share originally, with the team lead intended to share out those coins appropriately among all the programmers working on the project!

Open transactions doesn't even get twelve shares a round I don't think, and it gets shitloads compared to most projects because it has like maybe as many as four programmers, maybe even more, who each get one share, and they work tons and tons of hours on that stuff all the damn time! I think they get one for FellowTraveller, and one for a guy who codes and debugs and packages it all for Windows, and one for a guy who does the whole autotools auto-build mess and maybe one for some other guy too.

Maybe it should not be per thousand words but, rather, per "mean number of words per author per round", so that if typical/mean words authors contribute is 50K words then 50k words is what it takes to get a share...

-MarkM-

I understand the sentiment. My point is just that there has been much talk of simply approaching new users punitively -- and that will kill this project IMO. In that vein, to take the earlier example, one user shouldn't be able to make 80x (or whatever absurd multiple) the amount another can based on nothing but seniority. That says absolutely nothing about quality and simply skews abuse to the senior heads. There needs to be a balance where new users are incentivized to create good content -- not just people who have been around a long time.

In your example based on mean words/author, what kind of range do you think we would see for share value? I'm having a tough time working it out.

[markm]

Mission critical infrastructure includes such things as up to date client source code. Less critical would be things like compiled clients for various operating-systems.

Devtome seems to be insanely more than mission-critical, its authors probably make more per hour than do people who build devcoin clients.

One share is supposed to mean you do ten hours of skilled work, such as programming, each week. That is what programmers get paid... or if they are working on specifically asked for things directly useful to the devcoin project, then they can get away with ten hours per month to get their one share.

-MarkM-

[FinShaggy]

Mission critical infrastructure includes such things as up to date client source code. Less critical would be things like compiled clients for various operating-systems.

Devtome seems to be insanely more than mission-critical, its authors probably make more per hour than do people who build devcoin clients.

One share is supposed to mean you do ten hours of skilled work, such as programming, each week. That is what programmers get paid... or if they are working on specifically asked for things directly useful to the devcoin project, then they can get away with ten hours per month to get their one share.

-MarkM-

I'm still not following with what this is really. Like making apps?

I thought Devcoin was the coin for artists, not JUST coders. How is a book any less worthy than coding?

[markm]

In your example based on mean words/author, what kind of range do you think we would see for share value? I'm having a tough time working it out.

I think it should not be how many shares of actual receivers file per round, it should be the whole of devtome gets twelve shares bounty then each round devtome can add up how many words each of its authors contributed and divide up the coins the twelve shares worked out to among its authors, like any other project was expected to divide up its bounty among those who worked on the project.

Mission critical infrastructure includes such things as up to date client source code. Less critical would be things like compiled clients for various operating-systems.

Devtome seems to be insanely more than mission-critical, its authors probably make more per hour than do people who build devcoin clients.

One share is supposed to mean you do ten hours of skilled work, such as programming, each week. That is what programmers get paid... or if they are working on specifically asked for things directly useful to the devcoin project, then they can get away with ten hours per month to get their one share.

-MarkM-

I'm still not following with what this is really. Like making apps?

I thought Devcoin was the coin for artists, not JUST coders. How is a book any less worthy than coding?

If we have devcoin clients / the devcoin network, we can pay for any books we want. But if we don't have any clients and we don't have the network, we cannot pay any devcoins to anyone for anything no matter how many books people write or how many we would like to pay for.

So having devcoins exist, that is, having client software that lets devcoins be sent and received and minted and so on, is more mission-critical than spending those coins, since the coins need to exist and be spendable before they can be spent at all.

-MarkM-

[FinShaggy]

In your example based on mean words/author, what kind of range do you think we would see for share value? I'm having a tough time working it out.

I think it should not be how man shares of actual receivers file per round, it should be the whole of devtome gets twelve shares bounty then each round devtome can add up how many words each of its authors cotnributed and divide up the coins the twelve shares worked out to among its authors, like any other project was expected to divide up its bounty among those who worked on the project.

-MarkM-

OHHH. I didn't get what you were saying.

But then we also have the problem of new people's work not being appreciated (of course unless it is spectacular, but who starts as an amateur writer and is just spectacular?)

[FinShaggy]

It would be cool if we had more devtome articles that were like forum style. With replies and such.

[FinShaggy]

If we have devcoin clients / the devcoin network, we can pay for any books we want. But if we don't have any clients and we don't have the network, we cannot pay any devcoins to anyone for anything no matter how many books people write or how many we would like to pay for.

So having devcoins exist, that is, having client software that lets devcoins be sent and received and minted and so on, is more mission-critical than spending those coins, since the coins need to exist and be spendable before they can be spent at all.

-MarkM-

...Wait... I'm really confused now. What is different between a wallet and "a client that lets you send and receive devcoins" and what is the difference between the merge mining pool, and the "minting".

And I'm not saying we need to SPEND the coins, I am saying we need STORES. If we have a store where you could buy silver or books (both coming from me soon) for Devcoin, then people wouldn't sell as many Devcoins, because they could just trade some for books or silver. There is a USE for them, so people WANT them.

And if the devtome heavy writers came together, so much could get done.

[FinShaggy]

Also,

If we made a thread for EACH individual bond that is for sale on the bounty bond site, then people would realize that they can use their devcoins to earn money, while funding projects.

I LITERALLY just figured it out like 2 weeks ago, and I don't have enough coins to put down on anything now. So it's too little too late for me, but we should make threads for others.

[markm]

But then we also have the problem of new people's work not being appreciated (of course unless it is spectacular, but who starts as an amateur writer and is just spectacular?)

It won't matter so much whether they are appreciated or not if they are only diluting the amount of money each person working on the devtome project gets, instead of diluting every damn project all at once.

It presumably is going to be like, okay, someone won the twelve shares bounty for 3d-printer files for the first stage booster rocket for the devspacemobile, so now we are announcing a new huge bounty, yes, another twelve share bounty, folks, for the second stage! And since the spacemobile project is obviously thoroughly started now, the first stage having been tested and debugged and proven, we will also have a twelve share bounty for the crew module, so it can be developed in parallel!

Oh but, someone wrote 80k words, so they of course get way more money than either of the space-agencies working on those two spacemobile bounties...

It just doesn't make sense.

-MarkM-

[FinShaggy]

It won't matter so much whether they are appreciated or not if they are only diluting the amount of money each person working on the devtome project gets, instead of diluting every damn project all at once.

It presumably is going to be like, okay, someone won the twelve shares bounty for 3d-printer files for the first stage booster rocket for the devspacemobile, so now we are announcing a new huge bounty, yes, another twelve share bounty, folks, for the second stage! And since the spacemobile project is obviously thoroughly started now, the first stage having been tested and debugged and proven, we will also have a twelve share bounty for the crew module, so it can be developed in parallel!

Oh but, someone wrote 80k words, so they of course get way more money than either of the space-agencies working on those two spacemobile bounties...

It just doesn't make sense.

-MarkM-

Wait, so are you suggesting something like a "twelve tribes of devtome". And each tribe gets a share, and works on a certain angle of development? So shares are within different groups?

[markm]

Not quite.

Typically, in the past, a really important thing the project needed would be awarded a twelve share bounty.

Arguably, devtome might be a really important thing the project needs, so maybe a twelve share bounty would be justified to have a devtome exist.

Going out on a limb, we could even imagine devtome is so insanely important that each and every month it deserves a bounty, provided it does, uh, something. Brings in so many new authors and/or so many words of new writing, maybe? Something.

Then just like other projects like pools or clients or whatever that are awarded bounties, the project leader of the team that wins the bounty is expected to divvy up the bounty coins among the team, the theory being the person the team chose as leader knows better than generic devcoin-admins how much each member of the team contributed to the project.

So it'd be like maybe the free open source spaceship project gets a twelve share bounty to develop whatever the next step of the spaceship is and the devtome project gets a twelve share bounty to do whatever is needed next for devtome and so on for whatever projects there are that are so important they warrant such a huge bounty.

However, your suggestion actually sounds a lot like the projects that have not been announced yet, the ones that would need appropriate domains, which we didn't want domain squatters to go out and get and try to hold to ransom, so partly we have been waiting until we have secured all the important domain names before talking about those projects.

Apparently it is not just the domain names that are a problem but also the amount we can afford to pay people to work on them. We are paying so much to authors who just piss away the coins lowering their value that offering even a huge - twelve whole shares - bounty for development of any one of the planned projects would be such a pathetic, laughable bounty that we could not reasonably expect anyone to do them for so little pay.

Paying authors even more than that just for any more-than-12 kilowords just adds insult to injury, not only offering people pathetic pay to do a huge project launch but also paying way the heck more than that to "authors" for the short stories they wrote in gradeschool or whatever the heck else they feel like posting.

Open Transactions is considered important - and thus gets paid something like maybe four or more shares every round - partly because it is to be used for these planned projects.

Blockchain based currencies are insecure, it is hard just getting enough miners mining devcoin, making more blockchains is crazy, thus, the plan is that all the other projects, the entire fields that devcoin wants to support, can get their however many shares of devcoin paid into their project's Open Transactions server, from which the project can share out the coins among the people working on that project without all the vulnerability and cost-to-pay-miners and so on that would be involved if we tried to launch a new blockchain based currency for each field of endeavour. (Think fields like maths, physics, biology, etc, though not those exact fields.)

So, Open Transactions is mission-critical: many entire fields of endeavour depend on it being working and useable. Yet it gets maybe four or more shares of devcoins per month. All fields other than coding and wiki-ariticle-writing are on hold until Open Transactions is ready for use AND devcoins are worth enough that people in those other fields will consider the amount of devcoins they are offered to be worth actually doing stuff for.

-MarkM-

[FinShaggy]

No quite.

Typically, in the past, a really important thing the project needed would be awarded a twelve share bounty.

Arguably, devtome might be a really important thing the project needs, so maybe a twelve share bounty would be justified to have a devtome exist.

Going out on a limb, we could even imagine devtome is so insanely important that each and every month it deserves a bounty, provided it does, uh, something. Brings in so many new authors and/or so many words of new writing, maybe? Something.

Then just like other projects like pools or clients or whatever that are awarded bounties, the project leader of the team that wins the bounty is expected to divvy up the bounty coins among the team, the theory being the person the teram chose as leader knows better than generic devcoin-admins how much each member of the team contributed to the project.

So it'd be like maybe the free open source spaceship project gets a twelve share bounty to develop whatever the next step of the spaceship is and the devtome project gets a twelve share bounty to do whatever it needed next for devtome and so on for whatever projects there are that are so important they warrant such a huge bounty.

-MarkM-

Ok. So there are only 12 shares to be distributed amongst the writers? Or there are 12 extra shares going to Devtome every round?

If we are doing an entire round, there is really no way for 1 person to decide how much was contributed. They are going to be swayed by the work closer to the end, and a machine does it more evenly. And again, newer people are going to be over looked, just like in any company or gang (everyone wants you to put in work first). So even if they do better than an average person on their first time, they may not be recognized over the regulars because the team leader has relationships, and wants to give coins to people he "feels" deserve them more.

And I mean, that would be cool. But we don't have enough stuff going on to split it up like that. Sure, it would be awesome to get a spaceship part built. But telling people they can't get paid until something like that is not a good way to ask them to do it.

It would be better to put these projects at the forefront of devcoin, get teams together that HAVE 3-D printers (how many of us even have one?) then from there we can say, "Here is a new project, equal to Devtome, it gets half the shares" and every time a new project comes up, the pie gets cut again. Which would be fine, because as these projects got popular, so would Devcoin.

[FinShaggy]

I know you code, so you think regular words don't mean much.

But 50,000 words is about 175 pages. If devtome published, they could earn the coins back. Even just to amazon.
And Devtome itself could be used for advertising (each article advertises the e-book version of itself with a link)

[FinShaggy]

And if Devtome had a blog, it could earn some good Adsense revenue for sure.  Just copy and paste the articles. I could even do it. I already have adsense, and I am pretty sure there is a way for me to differentiate between sources of clicks (not each article, but differentiate between my money and devtome's and I could send pictures to ya'll).

[MAbtc]

It would be cool if we had more devtome articles that were like forum style. With replies and such.

This could be very cool. 

[MAbtc]

Arguably, devtome might be a really important thing the project needs, so maybe a twelve share bounty would be justified to have a devtome exist.

Going out on a limb, we could even imagine devtome is so insanely important that each and every month it deserves a bounty, provided it does, uh, something. Brings in so many new authors and/or so many words of new writing, maybe? Something.

[...]
Paying authors even more than that just for any more-than-12 kilowords just adds insult to injury, not only offering people pathetic pay to do a huge project launch but also paying way the heck more than that to "authors" for the short stories they wrote in gradeschool or whatever the heck else they feel like posting.

Considering the state of devcoin, what importance would you place on devtome in regards to adoption? Certainly, coins need to get in the hands of non-developers. I'd posit that this is actually quite important to the survival of the coin. You can't create an economy by circulating coins around the same small niche of people.

Also, I haven't browsed the site enough to say myself... but you seem to indicate that everyone is publishing only grade-school level crap. Is that really the case? If one were to publish high quality content, does this change anything, or is it still "insult to injury"?

[markm]

Authors should be a kind of developer, they develop free open source writings.

So, like other developers, whether they are developing free open source hardware or free open source software or whatever else, they should be getting similar pay, one would imagine.

Pay for developers of free open source software is one share per month for ten hours per week of work, or, if they are specifically working on tasks directly wanted by the devcoin project, they can get away with ten hours per month.

So for example it might be reasonable to say that a devtome developer who spends ten hours per month making categoriy pages listing all the other pages that fall into each category could get one share per month for that. Developers (aka authors) who develop random pages of whatever they happen to want to write about should be able to get one share a month if they are spending forty hours a month (ten hours a week) authoring such pages. That would put authors of wiki pages/articles on the same payscale as authors of blockchain-based currency clients, authors of Open Transactions and so on and so on.

Normally the idea is to find the people who already do those things naturally for free just because those are things they are going to do anyway. So for example if it was discovered that there existed a contributor to devtome who puts in forty hours a month developing a history of the world on devtome, and having a history of the world on devtome seemed like a great idea, so that a person who all on their own without any pay or reward was putting that much work into doing it was an admirable kind of person spending their time freely developing such a useful thing, then that person might be nominated to go onto the devcoin recipients list, so that they receive a share of devcoins every month as long as they continue putting in that much work on projects that awesome.

That is for example why FellowTraveller, developer of Open Transactions, receives a share of devcoins every month. He works like crazy on Open Transactions, probably more than forty hours a month, it is crazy-useful awesome software, so he was placed in the list of people who receive a share of devcoins.

So it seems reasonable the same should apply to the wiki: if it turns out that some contributors to the wiki spend lots of hours month after month working on awesome stuff for the wiki, they too, like FellowTraveller, maybe deserve to receive a share of devcoins each month that they continue to do so...

-MarkM-

[FinShaggy]

Arguably, devtome might be a really important thing the project needs, so maybe a twelve share bounty would be justified to have a devtome exist.

Going out on a limb, we could even imagine devtome is so insanely important that each and every month it deserves a bounty, provided it does, uh, something. Brings in so many new authors and/or so many words of new writing, maybe? Something.

[...]
Paying authors even more than that just for any more-than-12 kilowords just adds insult to injury, not only offering people pathetic pay to do a huge project launch but also paying way the heck more than that to "authors" for the short stories they wrote in gradeschool or whatever the heck else they feel like posting.

Considering the state of devcoin, what importance would you place on devtome in regards to adoption? Certainly, coins need to get in the hands of non-developers. I'd posit that this is actually quite important to the survival of the coin. You can't create an economy by circulating coins around the same small niche of people.

Also, I haven't browsed the site enough to say myself... but you seem to indicate that everyone is publishing only grade-school level crap. Is that really the case? If one were to publish high quality content, does this change anything, or is it still "insult to injury"?

I feel like this is bullshit, because I posted my Hannibal and Egypt articles on other sites, and people are asking me to read about other historical figures and summarize them because they liked my summaries so much.

[FinShaggy]

Authors should be a kind of developer, they develop free open source writings.

So, like other developers, whether they are developing free open source hardware or free open source software or whatever else, they should be getting similar pay, one would imagine.

Pay for developers of free open source software is one share per month for ten hours per week of work, or, if they are specifically working on tasks directly wanted by the devcoin project, they can get away with ten hours per month.

So for example it might be reasonable to say that a devtome developer who spends ten hours per month making categoriy pages listing all the other pages that fall into each category could get one share per month for that. Developers (aka authors) who develop random pages of whatever they happen to want to write about should be able to get one share a motnh if they are spending forty hours a month (ten hours a week) authoring such pages. That would put authors of wiki pages/articles on the same payscale as authors of blockchain-based currency clients, authors of Open Transactions and so on and so on.

-MarkM-

Hours wouldn't work. I literally have Devtome pages open 24/7 on my laptop.

Plus, I write fast. Someone might sit for 30 minutes thinking, while I write 5,000 words. And my 5,000 words don't mean dick?